


Good Choices

by cyphernaut



Series: Culture Shock [2]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Discipline, Spanking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:54:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24550384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyphernaut/pseuds/cyphernaut
Summary: Jack is getting marginally more comfortable in his authority, so Daniel makes it harder for him.This takes place several months after the events in "Culture Shock".
Relationships: Daniel Jackson & Jack O'Neill
Series: Culture Shock [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1774372
Comments: 15
Kudos: 37





	1. Wednesday

**Author's Note:**

> I know I said I was going to write the Abydos one first, but I ended up starting with this one. The Abydos one was a little more serious.

_“Do not interfere. Hold your position.” Jack ordered over the radio. Teal’c stood beside him, his expression impervious to the danger Carter and Daniel had somehow managed to stumble upon._

_The radio crackled. “Jack, they’re going to die if we don’t do anything.”_

_“You don’t know that. We have no idea what’s going on there. **Hold your position**.”_

_Jack waited for the next string of arguments, and when none came, he knew something was wrong. “Carter, please tell me-”_

_“He’s gone, sir,” she confirmed, and Jack swore._

_“Okay, go after him. We’ll be there ASAP.” He turned to Teal’c. “I’m going to kill him. I’m really going to kill him this time.”_

_“Daniel Jackson does not appear to view potential death as a deterrent.”_

_“Okay, let’s go save him so I can kill him.”_

* * *

They were alive. They were all alive. The people they’d wanted to save were alive. And Jack was _pissed_. Daniel’s few attempts to convince him that he shouldn’t be pissed had backfired, and it had taken all of Jack’s self control not to drag him back to the gate by his shirt collar. He’d managed to keep his temper in check as General Hammond greeted them, and even as Dr. Frasier began the medical checks. Jack had pushed Daniel to the front of the line with an off hand comment about checking for anything that could have made him lose his mind, and Janet had only lifted an eyebrow before starting the exam.

Daniel passed, of course, no mitigating factors to explain away the disregard for his own safety, just his standard bleeding-heart recklessness, bolstered with a strong dose of disrespect for the chain of command. Jack caught his arm on his way out of the infirmary.

“Daniel.” Daniel turned back, eyebrows raised, and not nearly wary enough for the amount of trouble he’d dug for himself. “Go home.”

“I was just going to go back to my-”

“Nope. Go home.”

Daniel furrowed his brow as if he didn’t know exactly what Jack was saying to him. “Are you ordering me off the base?”

“Nope. I’m ordering you to go home.”

Daniel’s eyes darted between Jack and Dr. Frasier. Neither man wanted to get into a pissing contest in front of the doctor, but Jack was willing to go through with it if it got his wayward archaeologist back to his apartment, where Jack could have the conversation that they needed to have. He could see the struggle as Daniel didn’t mention that Jack actually couldn’t order him back home, or to do anything outside his role as a civilian consultant, and even that was a tenuous reach when they weren’t on a mission. He was smart enough, though, to realize that he didn’t want an audience for the next stage of the conversation, which would be Jack explaining to him exactly what consequences he _could_ enforce. 

Jack sweetened the pot with the vague threat of just that. “Do you want to hear your other choices?”

“Jack, this is ridiculous. I’m fine.” The transparent attempt to save face fell flat, and Daniel visibly weighed his options before gritting out, “Fine, I’m going home.”

Dr. Frasier watched him leave, then turned her scrutinizing gaze onto Jack, who shot her a charming grin in return. Her eyes narrowed, and she held a warning finger to his face. “Don’t do it again.”

Before he could respond, she’d turned her attention to the chart the nurse had begun filling out on him. Jack decided to play dumb, a role he’d perfected over the years. “I don’t know what-”

She cut him off with the same finger, an inch from his nose. “I don’t care what he said. I don’t care what he says. _Don’t_ do it again.”

“Don’t I outrank you?” Jack asked, flinching as she pointed a bright light directly into his eyes. 

“Open your mouth,” she ordered him, penlight held high. 

He obeyed.

* * *

Jack stood in front of Daniel’s apartment door, his hands light with the absence of his customary food-based peace offering, but that was not the type of conversation he was planning to have. The noise from inside made it clear that Daniel was home, just taking his sweet time answering Jack’s knock.

“Okay, I’m here.” Daniel said as he finally opened the door, holding out his hands as if his presence were enough to satisfy Jack and send him on his way.

Jack ignored the passive-aggressive dismissal. “Can I come in?”

Daniel backed away from the door, giving Jack barely enough room to slide past him. He continued into the apartment, feeling Daniel’s sullen glare on the back of his head. Jack was glad they were having the conversation here, because if Daniel’s attitude was any indication, the smart money was on it going south pretty quick. 

“Why are you here?”

The question oozed out with all of the long-suffering condescension that Daniel knew pushed Jack’s buttons. It was the icing on the cake. Daniel ignored orders, put himself in danger, coerced the whole team to back him up, then got pissy when Jack called him on it.

“Why don’t you take a guess, Daniel?”

Daniel didn’t guess. He went to the kitchen and poured hot water into a mug. Jack was prepared to wait for a while, but he wasn’t prepared for Daniel to walk down to his living room, sit on the couch, and start reading a book.

Jack followed and pulled the book from his hands. “Oh, no. We’re not done. We’re going to talk about what happened today.”

“I saved a bunch of people’s lives, and you got angry,” Daniel recalled, feigning distraction as he poked through the other books on the coffee table.

“Or…you wanted to do something dangerous. I told you ‘no’, and you ran off and did it anyway, forcing the rest of the team to risk their own skin backing you up. You wanna tell me what’s wrong with that picture?”

“Why?” Daniel selected something old, heavy, and incomprehensible, then began to read, a clear challenge to Jack, who still held the confiscated book between them. “You’ve already decided, which is why you followed me to my house to yell at me.”

“Oh, I’m not yelling.” He wanted to be yelling, but he wasn’t yelling. “Would you like me to yell at you? I can yell at you.”

Daniel slowly graced him with a wearied stare. “Why are you here?”

When Jack had been young, he’d had an older babysitter who’d once told him she’d ‘smack that smug look’ off his face. At the time, it had only increased his self-satisfaction: he’d always been an expert at provoking authority. On the other side of it, he could almost feel his palm itching to follow through. Instead, he put the book back on the coffee table and stepped back toward the kitchen, out of arm’s reach.

“Okay, if you don’t wanna talk, you don’t wanna talk. You’re suspended from duty.”

“No.” 

As the answer rang in his head, Jack tried to work out what it could possibly mean in context of their conversation. “I’m sorry?”

“No. Sorry, Jack, but I’m not getting suspended for saving people’s lives.” He was so matter of fact about it, that Jack started to wonder whether he might be in an alternate universe where he wasn’t actually second in command of the entire base. Of course, the simpler explanation was that Daniel was just a stubborn brat. Occam's razor.

“Great. Let me know how that argument goes down with the SF’s who arrest you tomorrow morning when you try to enter the base without clearance.”

Jack waited as Daniel chewed on the inside of his lip, fiddled with the book in his hands, stared out the window, took a breath, then glowered at the nothing in front of him. “How long?”

“Four days.”

Daniel raised his eyebrows, and Jack could see the resentment bordering on fury as he stared straight ahead. “That’s the same as the time they started shooting at us.”

“Yep, same as last time you disobeyed my orders and went running off to put yourself in danger. That’s precedent.”

“But nothing happened this time. It worked. I was right,” he hollowly explained to an invisible point in the middle of the room. 

“You were lucky.”

“It wasn’t luck, Jack,” he protested, finally acknowledging that he was speaking to another human being. “I knew that it would probably work.”

Jack didn’t bother pointing out the inconsistency between ‘knew’ and ‘probably’. If Daniel wanted to talk probability, they would talk probability. Jack was glad they were having a conversation at all. “Okay, what was the chance that you were going to get blown up?”

“I wasn't,” Daniel answered, as if it were an answer at all.

“No, I want a number. You said you knew it would probably work, so what did you calculate your chances of getting blown up were?”

Daniel looked around as if a percentage would be found in the midst of the artifacts he’d squirrelled all over the living room. “I don’t know. Um, twenty percent?”

“ _Twenty percent?_ ” Jack gaped. There was no way that it was that high, but the fact that Daniel would throw it out as possible odds floored him. “Daniel, you do something like that four times, and you’re probably _dead_.”

“Five times.”

“What?”

“Twenty percent is a one out of five chance, not one out of four.”

The worst part of it was, Daniel probably didn’t even know what a snotty little know-it-all he was being. It was just reflex.

“Thank you for the math lesson, Dr. Jackson. Now let me return the favor. Twenty percent chance of dying is eighty percent chance of surviving. Surviving four times is eighty over a hundred to the fourth, or about forty percent, which is a sixty percent chance of dying. Otherwise known as: probably dead.”

Daniel squinted at him. “You did eighty over a hundred to the fourth in your head?”

“Not the point!” He took a moment to remind himself what the point actually was, since it wasn’t Daniel’s inability to wrap his mind around the fact that Jack could do basic math. “A twenty percent fatality rate is unacceptably high. Imagine if one out of five teams we sent through the gate didn’t come back.”

“Okay, then not twenty percent. Five percent. Or one percent.” Jack shook his head, astounded at Daniel’s ability to throw intellectual rigor out the window when it suited his fancy, and Daniel had the gall to look indignant at Jack’s reaction. “It doesn’t matter the percent because people were going to die if I didn’t take the chance.”

“That’s the problem, Daniel. It _does_ matter the risks that you take.”

“I had to. You weren’t going to do anything.”

“Oh, thanks, Daniel. Now I get it. You didn’t agree with me, so you ‘had to’ disobey orders.”

Daniel threw him one of his patented looks, the one that communicated that Daniel was _way_ too mature to engage with Jack’s childish sarcasm. Jack didn’t buy it for a second.

And _bonus_ , he didn’t have to, because he was in command of the mission.

“Okay, four days suspension, and you spend that time here, in this apartment. You can come back to work next Wednesday.”

“That’s six days.”

“Again, great math lesson, Daniel. I’m not including the weekend, which you’ll also be spending at your apartment.”

Daniel managed to look affronted at the idea of having to spend a few days in his apartment, for an offense that could have landed him years in jail had he been military. “That’s _worse_ than last time, even though I was right.”

“Last time didn’t roll over a weekend.”

Something in Daniel’s face turned inward, in a way Jack didn’t like. “You can’t actually make me stay in on the weekend.”

If Daniel wanted to play ‘What can Jack make Daniel do?’, Jack was on board.

“Great point. Six days suspension.” 

Daniel didn’t even look offended, just stunned. “Are you serious?”

“You can come back to work next Friday.”

“You can’t do that Jack! You already said four.”

“I did say four, and you argued with me, and I made it six. Now you’re arguing again, and I’m making it eight.”

“What the-? I didn’t even do anything!”

“Are you shooting for ten? Because it sounds like you’re shooting for ten.”

“Why are you even _here_?!” Daniel snapped, jumping up from the couch and stomping to his room, where he disappeared behind a slammed door.

Jack bit down on the urge to tell Daniel that he’d worked himself up to ten days. In fact, as the minutes ticked by with Daniel out of the room, Jack started to feel like the complete ass that he was. He’d let Daniel get to him, then he’d made it worse by deliberately pressing Daniel’s buttons, too.

Everything with Daniel had always been messy, and Jack was usually okay with that, because the benefits outweighed the costs. He tried to disentangle the boundaries that he needed to set for mission safety from the anger he’d felt toward a friend whom he’d allowed to get under his skin in a way that he never would have with most people under his command.

When it came down to it, Daniel had made an impulsive choice to act against orders and put the entire team at risk. Not okay, even if he did it for the best of reasons. Everything beyond that was them poking at each other, with Jack using the authority of his command to poke harder. 

They’d come to an uneasy balance, with Jack really only claiming command authority while they were on missions, and even then not demanding all the trappings that usually came with it. Disrupting that balance was also a big load of not okay, even if Daniel was the most frustrating weirdo he’d ever had to keep from getting himself killed. 

Colonel Jack O’Neill was going to have to suck it up.

He knocked on the bedroom door. When Daniel didn’t respond, he opened it a crack. “Hey, Danny, I’m coming in.”

The nickname had slipped out easily, and Daniel didn’t seem to mind, lying supine in the middle of the bed, ignoring Jack’s presence. Jack leaned against the door frame.

“I guess I deserve the silent treatment.”

“Every time I say something you suspend me for longer.”

Jack looked at his boots. Touché. And Daniel didn’t even seem angry, just subdued and maybe a little hurt.

“Yeah, about that: we’re just doing the four day suspension. That was some Principal Vernon level-” At Daniel’s blank stare, Jack backed up. “Principal Vernon? _The Breakfast Club_? They’re all in detention and-”

“Could you please stop framing everything like I’m a kid?”

“Yeah, sure,” he agreed. “Although, you did stomp off to your room, slam the door, and sulk on your bed for half an hour.”

He smiled softly at Daniel, who was still giving him the stink-eye.

“I’m not sulking. I needed some time to cool off.”

“Fair enough. Are you cooled off enough for us to talk about this?”

“I don’t know. Probably not.”

Jack stuck his hands in his pockets. So he was going to have to work for it. “How about I make us some grilled cheese and we talk about it at the table?”

“No, I don’t want you to make me a grilled cheese because I’m not ten years old.”

“Right.” Jack had been previously unaware that there was an age limit on who could enjoy a grilled cheese sandwich. “Is there a specific grown up dinner that you would like to have? Some sort of big boy sandwich?”

“Could you please talk to me like I’m an adult?!” Daniel punctuated the demand with a pillow flung at Jack’s face.

“Okay!” He caught the pillow and tossed it back on the bed. “We’re just two grown ups having a mature conversation. And a pillow fight.”

At the tiny twitch of Daniel’s lips, Jack knew that he had won. He put on his most serious face.

“So, Dr. Jackson, did you see C-SPAN last night? And what do you think about that AOL Time Warner merger? I mean, the stock market-”

“Okay, fine! I’ll have a grilled cheese.”


	2. Chapter 2

Jack pulled into the parking lot of the third hardware store he’d visited that Saturday morning. He could hear Sara’s voice asking him why he hadn’t just called ahead, and he put it out of his mind. As a point of principle, hardware stores should have a reasonable variety of doorknobs. The silver lining was that this particular hardware store happened to be not far from Daniel’s apartment, and Jack had been hoping to swing by over the weekend, anyway. He wasn’t delusional enough to think that their talk on Wednesday had sorted out Daniel’s insistence that he’d done the right thing, even if he’d grudgingly agreed to the terms Jack had laid out for him.

Entering the store, Jack swallowed his pride and asked someone to help find what he was looking for. When they both came up empty, Jack accepted the offer to have his new friend ‘Chris’ call around for him.

Serendipity must have been smiling on him, because as he approached the front of the store, he found another friend waiting at the help counter, a friend who had yet to notice Jack’s presence.

“Hey, fancy meeting you here,” he greeted, sidling up to Daniel, as Chris crossed into the employee area to make his calls. “What a great day to be out of the house, right?”

Daniel froze for long enough that Jack thought he might be trying to play dead, but his entire body eventually sagged in defeat, as if Jack’s presence were the culmination of every bad thing that had befallen him in the past year. “Are you following me?”

“No, I’m not _following_ you. But I was going to swing by your place afterward, so this is just a jump on the inevitable.” Chris was already on the phone with another location across town, and Jack was able to focus on Daniel, who was less than appreciative of the attention. “What are you doing here?”

“I have to fix something.”

“Really.” Daniel wasn’t exactly a DIY enthusiast. And he was a renter. “And you thought this warranted a jailbreak because...?”

“Jack, can we please not do this in the middle of Ace Hardware?”

“Well, Danny-boy, Ace Hardware is where you are.” Chris wasn’t paying them any attention, so Jack drilled down. “Betcha wish you were back at your apartment, though, dontcha?”

“Yeah, Jack, I’m sorry. The restriction was driving me crazy, and-”

“Yep, staying in your house all day kinda sucks. That’s why we made it a punishment.”

“Yeah, I know, but…” He paused, the dozens of languages he spoke insufficient to articulate whatever he wanted to say. “I actually kind of lost it.”

“Ah, the insanity defense. Nice try.”

“Jack!” Daniel closed his eyes and bit his lip before continuing through clenched teeth. “I got so mad I kicked a hole in my wall, okay?”

Jack looked Daniel up and down, took in the khaki slacks, the owlish wireframe glasses, the button down shirt and sweater that just screamed ‘humanities professor’, and let out a dismissive chuckle. “No, you didn’t.”

* * *

Squatting down next to the couch, Jack inspected Daniel’s living room wall. He’d kicked clear through the drywall, a big enough hole that he’d need to square it out and patch it. 

“Is it weird that I’m kind of proud?” He glanced up to see Daniel’s mortified face. “Yeah, It’s weird that I’m kind of proud.”

“Jack…”

Jack stood to shake Daniel’s shoulder in comfort and congratulations. “My mousy little archeologist got so mad he kicked a hole in a wall.” 

“It’s not funny, Jack. I’m going to lose my security deposit.”

Ignoring Daniel’s protest, Jack surveyed the crumbled gypsum at his feet with playful satisfaction. “I feel like, in a way, I also kicked that hole in the wall.”

“Good, then maybe you can pay for the security deposit.” Behind the petulant grumbling lay some actual anxiety about patching a bit of drywall, and Jack took pity.

“We can fix it tomorrow. I’ll stop by Ace on the way over.”

He didn’t miss the way Daniel’s shoulders sagged in relief at the promise, and he was under no illusions as to who would actually do the fixing. Whatever Daniel’s talents were at reassembling ancient artifacts, they did not extend to repairing anything made in the past century, likely more a problem with willingness than with ability. He clapped Daniel on the back. 

“Okay, let’s go work out the details of your extended punishment.”

“Oh, God. Isn’t doing a home improvement project with you punishment enough?”

“Well, that’s just hurtful, Daniel,” he drawled, pointing to the couch. Daniel threw him a skeptical scowl, but sat down. “My counteroffer to me fixing your wall as punishment is another four days of restriction, this time with no modem.”

“Jack! I was only gone for forty-five minutes!”

“This isn’t a make-up session. This is an additional punishment for not sticking to the first one. Funny thing about punishments: they’re about as optional as orders.”

“What’s really ‘funny’ is that I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place.”

“Really? We’re still there?” Jack wasn’t sure why he was feigning surprise. The closing theme of Wednesday’s conversation had been that Daniel was generously indulging Jack’s unreasonable demands in a commendable effort to take the high road. Whether either of them believed that story was another matter entirely. “You still don’t understand why it was wrong to unilaterally decide to risk everyone’s life against orders?”

“I didn’t risk everyone. I told Sam I’d catch up with you guys at the stargate.”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Daniel! In what universe did you ever think that we were going to go back to the stargate and let you die?”

That shut Daniel up. And he had to know that Jack was right, regardless of what he was willing to admit. They’d talked about this specific kind of situation before, and Daniel knew what he should have done. He was just too impulsive, too stubborn, and way too good at justifying whatever reckless idea had captured him in the moment, the undisputed champion of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

Jack’s reproachful stare must have been on autopilot as he thought the situation through, because Daniel was shifting uncomfortably beneath it, his indignation turned to reflective dismay. “If I stay here another week, my apartment’s going to look like a block of swiss cheese.”

“And as bad as that will be, is it a fifth as bad as you getting blown up?”

Jack watched as Daniel put the numbers together, his twenty percent chance of getting blown up fed back to him in service of Jack’s argument that his punishment was entirely more lenient than it needed to be. Daniel’s face tipped down as he considered the implications.

“Don’t I get any choices?”

“Danny,” he groaned into his palms. He just wanted it to be over with, but Daniel always had to push and wheedle and wrangle until Jack was ready to throw in the towel. “Okay, today’s specials are: the rest of the week in your apartment without your modem, now through Wednesday in a holding cell, or five days alternate duty after the suspension is over.”

“That’s it?” Daniel asked, and Jack braced himself for the inevitable bargaining session.

“Yep, three options. Two more than most people get.”

“Can’t we do a physical punishment again, and just have everything over?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I said ‘no’!” he snapped before he realized what was coming out of his mouth. He took a breath and tried again. “Because you fell apart on me, and I don’t want to do that to you again.”

“I didn’t kick a hole in the wall.”

“Daniel, I can patch a hole in the wall. I don’t know what to do when you’re falling apart like that.” 

“But I was fine after.”

“No, you weren’t fine. You said you _thought_ you should be fine because I did the same thing to you that your abusive foster dad did, so you _thought_ you should be okay with it. So, no, we’re not doing that again.”

The truth was, Jack had been scared. He’d barely tapped Daniel with the belt, and Daniel had panicked, alternately pleading with Jack and insisting that he wanted to go through with it. Afterward, he’d shivered in Jack's arms, gasping for breath, unable to get a single word out, with Jack rattled by the breakdown over what had been in essence a mild spanking. The story about his foster dad had explained a lot, even as much as Daniel hadn’t wanted it to.

“So because my foster dad was abusive, you don’t believe me when I tell you what I want.”

“I’m- _What?_ ” That was not what Jack had meant, although it was probably exactly what Jack had meant. Arguing with Daniel about Daniel’s feelings, though, was a losing proposition. “No matter how ‘fine’ you were, _I_ was not fine. _I_ don’t want to go through that again.”

“Is it more than a fifth as bad as me getting blown up?” At the sound of his own words thrown back at him, Jack was ready to kick his own hole in the wall, and Daniel pounced on his hesitation. “I won’t fall apart.”

“You can’t make that promise.” In fact, Jack would lay good money on Daniel breaking that promise as soon as Jack took off his belt. The entire situation was surreal, and he couldn’t help but think that there was something else going on. “Why would you want this?”

Daniel shrugged, as if the answer should be obvious to anyone with half a brain cell. “I just want to be back to work as soon as I can.”

“I’m not buying it.” No one wanted to be at work that bad, and if Jack hadn’t been sure before, the slow deflation of Daniel’s entire body would have been confirmation enough. With all of the military’s interrogation tactics at his disposal, Jack instead turned to the same stare he’d used to convince Charlie that honesty was, in fact, the best policy. “Tell me the truth, Daniel.”

As the silence stretched on, Jack started to think that Daniel might not have an answer for him. But then Daniel pushed up his glasses to rub at the tension around his eyes, gearing himself up. After two false starts, he finally spoke, gaze trained on the edge of the coffee table.

“All the other ones I have to wait so long for them to be over, by myself.” He pressed his fists into the cushions on the couch, lifting himself slightly, shoulders bunched around his bowed head. His frame constricted with the position. Tiny against the backdrop of his emotions, Daniel rocked back down, bit at his lip, and stared out the balcony door. “It’s the only one you’re there the whole time.”

Either Daniel had the most brilliantly manipulative mind Jack had ever encountered, or they’d gotten to the core of what was going on. In a way, Jack wished he’d believed the original lie. He remembered Hammond’s comment that they were the closest thing that Daniel had to family.

“Kasuf says isolation is cruel,” Daniel added, reminding Jack of another family that Daniel had lost. 

“I’m not trying to isolate you.”

“Yeah, you are. Don’t go on the base. Stay in the apartment. Don’t email Sam. Sit in a holding cell. Do another job away from the team.”

“It’s just a few days,” Jack said, but he knew the answer wasn’t good enough as soon as his eyes travelled from Daniel’s broken expression to the gaping hole in the wall. The humor he’d found in his unassuming academic losing his temper so spectacularly began to fade, and he was left with the realization of the stress he’d put Daniel under. “I want you on the team, Daniel, and that’s not changing. But what you did was dangerous and stupid, and is it my job to keep you from doing things that are dangerous and stupid. Not to mention that I am personally invested in you not dying, so I can’t let this slide.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

Of course not. He was just rejecting every punishment that Jack felt marginally comfortable with. And even if Jack went along with it, he knew Daniel wasn’t going to make it easy for him, all promises aside. Even worse was that he knew he was going to do it. He clenched his jaw and steeled himself for what was ahead.

Janet was going to kill him.

“All right,” he said, and Daniel immediately tensed up.

“Wait!”

Jack paused in doing the absolutely goddamn nothing that he had been doing and waited for Daniel to follow through with whatever last minute concern he had conjured. When the moment fizzled, Jack ran a hand over his face and marched forward. “Are you going to be okay with the belt?”

“What are my choices?” Daniel asked, because of course he wanted a menu for this sort of thing.

Unfortunately, Jack's plan for the day had not included this particular scenario, had in fact been limited to installing a door knob in his guest room closet and stopping by the grocery store, and this wasn’t a situation in which he was inclined to be creative. He took in the random artifacts that surrounded them. “Do you have something else in mind?”

Daniel shook his head quickly, closing the door to whatever his imagination had supplied. “No, the belt’s fine.”

“And you’re not going to freak out.”

“No,” Daniel assured him. “But if I do, just keep going.”

Jack closed his eyes at the request. If Daniel _did_ have the most brilliantly manipulative mind Jack had ever encountered, he was doing a great job of making sure Jack was as tortured as possible during the entire process. Jack glanced around to find some corner of Daniel’s cluttered apartment that they would actually have space to go through with it. 

“Okay, come over here and put your hands on the couch cushion,” he said, walking behind the couch opposite Daniel and unbuckling his belt. That would put Daniel over the back of the couch, where he probably had a better chance of staying in one place.

Eyeing the spot Jack indicated, Daniel gnawed lightly at his lower lip. “Um, what are my other options?”

“Seriously?” Jack started to look around, then caught himself. The haggling might be a stalling tactic, a power play, or something else Jack was unaware of, but he _was_ aware that there was no mystical place in the apartment that was going to make Daniel more okay with what was about to happen. And beyond that, it was a punishment. And beyond _that_ , the incessant bargaining was kind of driving Jack crazy. “This is not a _Choose Your Own Adventure_. We’re done with the options.”

“What if I just stand up and-”

“No.”

“But I-”

“God _damn_ it, Daniel. Why is it that when you get punished for doing something wrong, you make it your personal mission to ensure that I am ten times as miserable as you are?” 

“I’m not! I just don’t see why it has to be that particular-”

“Nope. Negotiation's over. Quit stalling and get over here.” He tapped the belt on the back of the couch, and Daniel ducked his head.

“No, Jack, you’re too mad now.” 

Daniel was scrunched up in the middle of the couch, anxiously rubbing at his knuckles, and Jack had to give him credit because that was very well played. “I’m not too mad, get over here.”

“Can’t we-”

“No. Get over here, _now_.” Jack shot off the last order with an expression that carried the clear expectation of obedience, and Daniel slowly stood and trudged toward him, taking a circuitous route around the couch that left him out of Jack’s reach for as long as possible. Jack waited until Daniel was standing in front of him. “You don’t get to pick and choose which orders you follow, and you don’t get to nitpick the details of your punishment.”

He put a hand on Daniel’s arm to turn him toward the couch, and Daniel jumped. “Wait! I changed my mind.”

Unlikely. “Okay, what do you choose instead?”

Daniel’s face went to pieces, his voice floating out thin and soft. “Can’t we just not have anything?”

“Come on, let’s go.” Jack extinguished the spark of optimism that said he should try to find a better solution, and leaned into the pragmatic truth that they should just get this over as soon as possible. He maneuvered Daniel over the back of the couch and rested his hand on Daniel’s lower back. As argumentative as Daniel had been, his body offered no resistance, only curled into itself as Jack placed him where he needed to be.

“I’m going to go fast so we’re done sooner.”

Ignoring how Daniel shifted at the news, Jack swung the belt up. Past the point of no return, he gritted his teeth, swearing internally. After a few choice words that never left his mind, he brought the belt down, the snap of it twisting his stomach even before Daniel flinched under his hand. He didn’t give himself time to think too much, raining down a couple more swats before Daniel’s hand flashed into view and he started to rise.

“No, Jack, wait.”

Jack snatched Daniel’s hand from the air and pinned it to the small of his back, before it could get in the way. He wasn’t swinging the belt nearly hard enough to do any damage to Daniel’s fingers, but he also didn’t want to make the ordeal more complicated, and the new position had the added benefit of keeping Daniel bent over.

“Stay down,” he warned, and kept going. Daniel’s feet kicked softly at the rug. He was making soft sounds of distress that Jack tried to ignore. Jack told himself that it was impossible that Daniel was feeling any physical pain from this, but he knew that wasn’t the point.

“Almost done.”

The last couple he put down with enough force to leave a bit of a sting, and Daniel visibly felt the difference, squirming in Jack’s grip for a few seconds before he realized that it was over. Jack freed his wrist, then helped him to his feet.

His stance was abjectly forlorn, with shoulders drawn in and chin tucked tight against his chest. The glasses had gone askew, and Jack realized he should have had him take them off first. Daniel didn’t bother to straighten them, just tenuously braced himself between the back of the couch and Jack’s forearm. More prepared than last time, Jack brought his free hand to Daniel’s shoulder and ducked slightly down to get a better look at his hidden expression. His face cast a brittle dam against the emotions that threatened to break through at any moment. Jack moved his hand from Daniel's shoulder up to his jaw.

“And that was better than getting suspended,” he sighed, feeling as broken as Daniel looked.

Daniel nodded, sucking in a shuddering breath, and Jack couldn’t help himself. He pulled Daniel to him, grasping him tightly and letting the tips of his fingers tap softly at the back of Daniel’s neck. Daniel buried himself in the hug. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” The punishment had ostensibly been for breaking the restriction, but who knew what Daniel was feeling guilty about. Disobeying orders? Putting everyone at risk? Falling apart after he said he wouldn’t?

“I don’t know. I’m just really sorry.”

“Okay, let’s go sit down.”

He navigated a shivering Daniel to the other side of the couch. The begrudging fondness Jack normally felt toward him had morphed into protective affection for this docile version, especially as Daniel slumped against him and allowed Jack to run a hand up and down his back. With a vague idea of their trajectory, Jack wasn’t as concerned as he had been the last time they’d been in this position. He also wasn’t as inclined to believe Daniel when he tried to push away from the embrace.

“Nope, not yet.” He pulled Daniel even closer instead, and Daniel burrowed into him before mumbling against his shoulder.

“They would have died if I hadn’t done anything.”

“I know,” Jack agreed. He recognized Daniel’s statement for what it was, not a protest or excuse, but a slow coming to terms with the decisions they sometimes had to make. “But Daniel, it’s a big universe, and there are a lot of people dying in it, and it’s my job to make sure that you’re not one of those people.”

“I can’t just decide to choose my own life over-”

“You’re right. You can’t. And you don’t have to. That’s _my_ job.” When he pulled back to reinforce his words with an uncompromising expression, Daniel visibly teetered at the edge of accepting what he had to say, and Jack took advantage of the opening. “And you’re not just risking your own life. You’re risking all of us, because we will come after you _every time_.”

“Yeah, I know.”

The acknowledgement was a little too subdued, a little too much of a confession for Jack’s comfort. “You know? So did you know on Wednesday that we were going to have to follow you down into that valley?”

“Yeah,” he sniffed. 

Jack put the pieces together. “All of that, ‘I’ll catch up with you at the stargate’ was just a cover? You intentionally manipulated the whole team into doing what you wanted instead of following my orders?”

“No?” Daniel ventured, a confirmation in itself.

“Oh, god, Daniel. I could smack you again.” Instead of smacking him, Jack hugged him again, trying to walk that thin line of affection and trying to squeeze the life out of him.

“It wasn’t my explicit thought process.” 

The protest came muffled through the fabric of Jack's shirt, and he pushed back on Daniel's shoulders to look him squarely in the eyes.

“If you ever try to wrest command of a mission from me again, explicitly or implicitly…” He cut himself off as he realized the threat he’d intended to make about being suspended until his hair had turned gray had somehow been replaced in his consciousness with one about not sitting down for a month. He abandoned the empty threats in favor of the truth. “You are going to be on a very short leash for the foreseeable future.”

“Sorry.” Despite the apology, Daniel didn’t seem too bothered by the prospect of closer supervision. He sat back in his seat and looked sideways at Jack. “Are you still going to help me fix my wall?”

“Yes, I will still fix your wall, but no more destructive rampages, capisce?”

“Yeah, okay,” he agreed, somehow resentful of Jack’s request that he not destroy his own home.

“And if you happen to choose to lay waste to your own apartment, you sit in the rubble until I come back.”

“Yeah, okay, Jack,” he groaned.

“Because I don’t wanna go through this again tomorrow. Or ever, Daniel.”

“It’s okay, Jack! You didn’t actually hurt me.” Daniel sucked on his teeth. “You didn’t even hit me that hard.” 

Oh, good. Daniel had recovered.

“I know I didn’t hurt you, because I wasn’t _trying_ to hurt you. I was trying to remind you that you are not in charge, and that there are limits to what I’ll allow you to do. If it wasn’t effective, go ahead and tell me right now.”

“No, it was. It was effective,” Daniel quickly assured him, wilting under Jack’s stern expectation.

“Good. Can’t wait to see its effects.”

“What specifically are you looking for?” Daniel asked carefully. “Because I was actually wondering if maybe it might be possible for me to go back to work on Monday.”

“Oh, you’re funny.”

“No, Jack, I’m serious.”

“I know. That’s what makes it so funny.”

“Jack!”

Jack let him stew for a few moments before laying out his counterproposal.

“You are still suspended through Tuesday. However, in the interest of the structural integrity of your apartment, and since you apparently need a babysitter to keep you from wandering off, how about I see if I can take Monday and Tuesday off, and we spend the rest of your suspension at my cabin?”

Strangely suspicious for someone who’d just been offered a vacation instead of house arrest, Daniel considered the offer. “What about the restriction?”

“You’ll be restricted to the cabin, and the cabin area. No running off to libraries or lecture halls, or whatever geeky recreational activities rural Minnesota has to offer.”

Daniel’s face said everything Jack needed to know about the geeky recreational activities rural Minnesota had to offer. “So, I’m just going to have to do yard work for three days like last time?”

“It was two hours, and you said you liked it.”

“No, I said it was better than fishing.”

Jack frowned at the memory. “I’m not going to make you fish again, Daniel. You talk too much. Scare all the fish away.”

“And no yard work?”

“Oh, no, that’s definitely going to happen," Jack assured him with a wolfish grin. "You are going to be doing hard time, my friend.”

“I think this might be a conflict of interest for you,” Daniel complained, as if there were any chance that he was going to turn down the invitation.

“Nope, not conflicted at all. I’m compiling a list of chores in my head right now. Gleefully.”

“Jack…” 

“ _Glee_ -fully.”

* * *

Daniel sneezed for about the seventeenth time in the past minute. And that was with the Allegra. At the rate he was going, Jack was going to have to go back to town for more tissues before the day was up.

“Sorry,” Daniel said. “It’s the grass. It’s worse when you cut it.”

“Shh, you’re scaring the fish.”

“Oh, God! A mosquito got in my eye.”

Jack turned from the water to see Daniel with his glasses in one hand, frantically rubbing at the corner of his eye with the other. It was probably a gnat. “Come on, Daniel! You’re sitting here, surrounded by the most beautiful place in nature, fishing rod in hand, cold beer at your feet.”

“I still don’t see why I couldn’t bring a book,” Daniel complained, grabbing another tissue and sneezing into it.

“Daniel?”

“Yes?” He sneezed again.

“I’m ordering you to enjoy yourself.”

“I don’t think that’s-” He sneezed. “I don’t think-” He sneezed again. “I don’t-” He let out a series of sneezes that left him doubled over in the camping chair. 

Jack twisted around to stare at him. “What did I _just_ say?”

“Sorry,” he apologized from behind a tissue, a pitiful victim of nature and forced domestic labor. Even Jack started to feel a twinge of empathy.

Cringing at his easy surrender, Jack forced himself to do the noble thing. “Do you want me to take you back to Colorado?”

Daniel shook his head and blew his nose into the last tissue. “No, I like it here.”

“Really?” Jack weighed him up. Sunburnt nose. Nails dark with the dirt of involuntary weeding. Skin sprinkled with mosquito bites. Eyes red-rimmed from allergies, and worse where he’d been rubbing at them. “Why?”

His tissues gone, Daniel sniffed and dabbed at his nose with the back of his hand. “You know why.”

Under the pretense of going for another beer, Daniel dragged his chair parallel to Jack’s, then dropped his hook back in the water, waiting with Jack for fish that they both knew would never come.

Yeah, Jack knew why.


End file.
